Ending is a woman's account of her husband's death from cancer. The course and consequences of his illness yield a plot which moves from diagnosis through the breaking of news to patient and family, to daily deterioration and eventual death. They also provoke a good deal of general retrospection and speculation….

Scornful reference is made to other characters' "stock phrases" about death and their lack of connection with the protagonists' "real lives", but Ending really serves to demonstrate the difficulty, and to some extent the foolishness, of trying to forge such connections—this despite the fact that it is often, and surprisingly, crisp and unsentimental. Looking at someone's life from the vantage-point of their early death almost invariably means that those large qualities which tug at the heart by their suggestion of death defiance—here "hopefulness, that unswayable pleasure in living"—are stressed, while the sense of someone's...